Imagine it is 2011 and you are one of the first football managers to sit the new emotionally intelligent, pro licence exam. One of the trickier questions - which may or may not be based on a real-life case history - is multiple choice as follows:

"You are an international head coach and one of your players, the prematurely balding X, is teased after receiving a hair transplant/acquiring a hair-piece. By the time you learn of his being pinned to the floor by team-mates seeking follicular "evidence" he has already wangled compassionate leave from a European Championship qualifying campaign by lying about the deaths of both his grandmothers. He says the underlying reason for his expensive escape - you hired a private jet to whisk him home - was a miscarriage suffered by his girlfriend but you are worried he simply could not handle the hair-related humiliation.

"Do you a) discipline him for causing unwarranted distress to his grandmas while letting his country down? b) show him a survey "proving" that women think bald men are better in bed? c) reprimand the other squad members for teasing the boy and devise a blueprint to reform the laddishly immature culture strangely peculiar to British and Irish football?"

The answer - which may or may not be influenced by the newly hirsute Stephen Ireland's rumoured "Grannygate" travails with the Republic of Ireland - is probably a combination of a) and c). While X must shoulder considerable blame, so arguably should those responsible for creating and perpetuating the hermetically sealed and often cruel world of professional football here.

If a player is somehow different from the rest he seems fair game for "treatment" - something many foreign Premier League imports know all about. A few years ago, when Steve Howey played for Newcastle, he detailed the typical induction process for overseas arrivals. "We hide their car keys, cut up their socks, squeeze their toothpaste tubes empty and pour their aftershave down the sink," he reported.

Homegrown professionals may be a little less unreconstructed these days - although it speaks volumes that no gay footballer has come out - but such boarding school style japes persist, particularly when managers insist on treating footballers as weird crosses between incapable schoolchildren and untouchable celebrities.

Back in 2002, for instance, England's Under-21s, then managed by David Platt, were billeted in Basle during their European Championship. Journalists were threatened with dire consequences if they dared enter the team's five-star de luxe base and press conferences were staged daily across town.

By chance English reporters shared the same functional hotel as Italy's Under-21s. Andrea Pirlo and friends breezed into the breakfast buffet, sometimes sharing tables with "civilian" guests and invariably behaving immaculately. Between training sessions the Italians wandered freely round the local shops and, come evening, even sipped coffee in the bar.

In contrast England's "stars" were so infantilised that, when they were spotted walking through Basle, it was in a strictly supervised, primary school style, group crocodile. Small wonder that two years earlier in Bratislava three bored England Under-21s had escaped to a bar across the road from their hotel but were swiftly apprehended by England's then coach, Howard Wilkinson.

Nigel Worthington was at that tournament as an England scout. Now Northern Ireland's manager, he is experiencing worse problems and last month dealt with a fight between Keith Gillespie and George McCartney on a flight from Iceland before fining Manchester United's Jonny Evans for drunkenness.

But then institutionalisation is often a friend of bad behaviour and an enemy of independent thought. This perhaps explains why the treatment of Player X and his new hairdo seemingly passed beyond an acceptably jocular pricking of vanity and became a more disturbing, Lord of the Flies-type scenario.

Stephen Ireland is said to be working through his "issues" with a psychologist. Significantly, when Bill Beswick, England's team psychologist, had the same role for Steve McClaren at Middlesbrough, his biggest achievement was enhancing squad harmony. "Bill treated you like an adult and helped you see things someone else's way," explained one Boro player. Which rather makes one wonder whether Player X is almost as much a victim of football's system as his own demons.